If you were thinking of checking out The Secret World in defiance of the head start launch of Secret World Legends, you might want to tread lightly in allowing your patcher to update itself. Why? Well players are finding that the The Secret World client is automatically updating itself to the Secret World Legends client, a similar but wholly different game in terms of servers and support from Funcom.
Luckily, there is a solution:
You have to download the new patcher from http://register.thesecretworld.com and install it to a DIFFERENT folder. Then copy the files from that folder into your old TSW folder and run the patcher as usual.
BACKUP your settings from %localappdata%\Funcom\TSW FIRST. The installer overwrites some of them.
This just locked some of us out of our final raids. Thank you, Funcom!
Big thanks to 'Torotoro Ton,' 'Mikuli Candelilla,' and 'Wyvern Myaji' of the Karnak server for inadvertently creating this beautiful scene.
Quick question: What do you hate most about Final Fantasy XIV? Odds are, the slow patcher is one of your top answers, and one you haven’t been able to find a fix to. If you are like me, you’ve been finding your patches through external hosts, through Mediafire or FFXIVCore until Square Enix started telling their fansites not to host patches. Despite Square’s patcher, peer to peer networking is truly a more efficient way to distribute patches, assuming the company steps in to host peers when not enough players have the patch (such as right after launch).
So I did find a quick fix. As it turns out, the problem lies with Square Enix’s patcher (go figure) not allocating a proper amount of seeders and leechers. Start the patch download in the client, and then cancel it. Go to C:/users/[user]/My Documents/My Games/Final Fantasy XIV/Downloads/FFXIV and the torrent will be sitting in one of the two folders “2d2a390f” or “48eca647.” Open the torrent file with a separate torrent client, and you should have no problem connecting and downloading. Whereas on the Square patcher, I had one running connection at 0.0b/s, using this on uTorrent was able to completely download the latest patch in about five minutes.
Move the patch from wherever it was downloaded to, to its correct folder (hunt around in the two folders until you find the file that the Square patcher created, and replace it with the one you downloaded). This was done on Windows 7, so your file location may have a slight difference. You can find the folder it is in by doing a windows search and typing in the name of the patch, in the case of the latest being “d2010.12.13.0000.”
More on Final Fantasy XIV as it appears. I would offer to host the patches myself, but Square Enix would shoot me.
Excuse me, I'd like to sell this patcher. It's, uh, rare.
Under normal circumstances, I could chalk this up to Final Fantasy XIV having just launched yesterday (for the head start) but at some point I would be injecting rationale and patience into an area of the system where people have historically rejected both. If you haven’t participated in Square Enix’s foray into the newest generation of Massively Multiplayer titles, Final Fantasy XIV has among the least user friendly patch downloading tools on the market. In open beta, I was assured by several vehement defenders that my infinity-estimated waiting time for this nine gigabyte patch would be fixed by the time the game launched. Granted, I was also called a “trolling d-bag” for my discontent that a fifteen megabyte patch should have a six hour waiting time, so take with it what you will.
Those of you who, like myself, managed to get into the open beta likely accomplished this task by using the Megaupload links on FFXIVcore, or managed to find the patches using someone else’s torrent system. As a number of people pointed out on unofficial forums (as the open beta testers weren’t allowed into the Square Enix forums), nothing kills interest in a game like being forced to jump through hoops just to install the damned thing.
Of course, this isn’t me just pulling “the general consensus” out of my rear end and presenting it as the majority opinion. A couple years ago, when NCsoft was putting forth plans to move Dungeon Runners to a web-client system, they noted that around one third of their users never even got past downloading the game. Of course people who plucked down fifty bucks on a game are going to try a lot harder to get in, but consider early discontent as a playing factor when Square Enix’s post 1-month figures come back.
Remember, a guy who says “I hated the game, there’s lag/performance issues” convinces few, as lag is subjective and based on time, location, and the person’s computer/internet. On the other hand, a person who says “I can’t really give an opinion, I never got the game working,” stands to convince many more not to go through the hassle of even giving the game a chance. Opinions on a game vary from person to person, but barriers of entry are universal.
So is Final Fantasy XIV doomed to head down the All Points Bulletin route and crash by this December? Not a snowball’s chance in hell. Owing to the Square Enix community, there are more than enough people willing to embrace the patcher, with its faults, and deal with it to cover those who will quit after the first month’s free time. If anything, one might consider the patcher a test of patience. If you’re patient enough to get download and move all the patches, then some of the facets of the game itself will be a breeze (not getting into that here, however). Of course, there is still plenty of time for Square to streamline the patcher once the population has gone down to its core populace.
Technically, Turbine has been doing this for a while with their game clients, but given that few other developers are unwilling to take on this same method, I figured Blizzard gets some notice. What’s the worst part of patching? If you have low bandwidth, your answer is likely the downloading portion. On large patch days, you can probably forget getting any World of Warcraft action in until sometime later in the day, assuming your connection holds up during the patching process.
Tentonhammer is reporting an addition to the WoW: Cataclysm beta, that will allow players to stream patches, allowing them to download only a small amount in order to get into the game while the rest downloads in the background. Your experience will not be ideal, according to the patch notes, but the hope is to minimize the time between patching and playing. There isn’t much information as to what “less than ideal” equates to, but in the realm of big patches and slow download speeds, it is better than nothing.
Hopefully this feature is made standard when World of Warcraft: Cataclysm goes live later this year.
MMO Fallout 